Friend or Foe? Social Integration and Coordination Strategies in Young Adolescents

This study investigates the interplay between adolescents' decision-making strategies in competitive, cooperative, and lottery-based contexts and their social integration with peers groups. Using a sample of 177 Italian adolescents, the research explores how behaviors in controlled game-theoretic environments relate to peer nominations in classroom settings. The results reveal that competitive risk-taking and response variance areis significantly associated with an increase in "least liked" nominations, indicating that adolescents who take more risks and who display less response variance in competitive situations are more likely to be rejected by their peers. Conversely, while cooperative behaviors also showed trends, they did not reach statistical significance in predicting peer acceptance or rejectioncooperative risk takingrisk-taking was not associated with social integration. To our knowledge, this is the first study to document a link between behavior in economic games and ecological social outcomes crucial to adolescent well-being, such as peer integration. These findings suggest that adolescents' success in peer integration is partly reflected in how they engage with simplified coordination problems involving anonymous others in controlled settings. This sheds light on promising new avenues for studying the cognitive bases of social integration during adolescence, providing a novel perspective on how competitive behaviors may shape social standing and peer relationships during this developmental stage.